“It’s not exactly that I’m annoyed. It’s …” He sighed, his voice trailing off. He took his cup from under the dispensing spout of the coffeemaker, added sugar, and stirred the coffee a lot longer than it needed to be stirred before completing his explanation. “When I get involved in something intense, I find it difficult to switch back to ordinary life.”

“It is difficult,” she replied. “I know. I think sometimes you forget what kind of work I do at the clinic, what kind of problems I deal with.”

He was about to point out that those problems didn’t usually involve murder, but he caught himself in time. She had the look in her eyes that meant an unfinished thought, so he just stood silently, holding his coffee cup, waiting for her to go on—expecting her to describe some of the more appalling realities of a rural crisis center.

But she took a different tack. “Maybe I can disengage more easily than you can because I’m not as good at what I do.”

He blinked. “What do you mean?”

“When someone has a great talent for something, there’s a temptation to focus on it to the exclusion of virtually everything else. Don’t you find that to be true?”

“I suppose,” he replied, wondering where this was going.

“Well, I think you have a great talent for figuring things out, for unraveling deceptions, solving complicated crimes. And maybe you’re so good at it, so comfortable in that particular way of thinking, that the rest of life seems like an uncomfortable interruption.” She searched his face for a reaction.

He knew there was truth in what she was saying, but all he could manage was a noncommittal shrug.

She went on in a soft voice. “I don’t see myself as having a huge talent for my work. I’ve been told I’m good at it, but it’s not the sum and substance of my life. It’s not the only thing that matters. I try to treat everything in my life as though it matters. Because it does. You, most of all.” She looked into his eyes and smiled in that odd way of hers that seemed to have less to do with her mouth than with some internal source of radiance.

“Sometimes when we talk about your absorption in a case, it turns into an argument—maybe because you feel that I’m trying to transform you from a detective into a hiking, biking kayaker. That might have been a hope or fantasy of mine when we first moved up here to the mountains, but it’s not anymore. I understand who you are, and I’m content with that. More than content. I know sometimes it doesn’t seem that way. It seems like I’m pushing, pulling, trying to change you. But that’s not what it is.”